Hi Michael-

I discussed the problem with the author of nickle (Keith Packard) in
2011-09 and he determined that there were other places in the code that
would trigger the same type of failure at runtime, if presented with
certain inputs.  The NewStrString instance is most obvious since it
happened at startup regardless of input, but fixing it with strncpy is
not sufficient to cover the other cases Keith identified (they occur in
other routines which cannot be converted to strncpy since they don't use
strcpy).

Keith stated his intention to fix the the problems "the right way" and
push a new version to Debian, but that has not yet occurred (I'll poke
him).

In the meantime, I recommend that we do just switch off _FORTIFY_SOURCE
for nickle.  While I fully agree with the general goodness of
_FORTIFY_SOURCE, nickle 2.70 really doesn't work properly with it
enabled.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/721636

Title:
  nickle crashes on amd64 natty

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